JKS Makokha

JKS Makokha is the Kenyan author of Reading M. G. Vassanji: A Contextual Approach to Asian African Fiction. (2009). He teaches courses in African and South Asian Literatures at the Institut für Englische Philologie at Freie Universität Berlin in Germany.

 The Last Call

Briing briinng!
Briing briinng!
Briing briinng!
Brin!

Silence…

At last out of battery breath,
between dew-covered papyrus leaves,
beyond which pond frogs in silence grieved,
below a lonesome moon swaddling its sobs
with a dark blanket of nimbus clouds,
the lonely, battered Nokia 6020 abruptly died…
three feet away from where death lay
on a crimson shroud of liquid hate.

Minutes of Silence…

II

The Tomb of Amani*

It lay in a sarcophagus in the vault of memory,
surrounded by piling skeletons of free-thought fighters.
In this tomb of regret,
the debris of democracy piles up,
each pile a generation of pain older than the pile beneath.

Rumour is that only through death can one reach it…

It lay in the tomb of regrets at the end of the memory lane,
buried deep inside the heart of a dark continent,
guarded by the phantoms of Lumumba and the pharaohs,
whose silence through the ages compose
black anthems of freedom in the idiom of a prison continent.

Rumour is that only through resurrection can one preach it...

III

Return of the Author

Yesterday

Long tears drip drop inwards.
Into the void of hopelessness,
inside the skeletal bodies around him,
the tears tear the heart
and fall into the empty bowels
in a silent splash…

Today

From unmapped lands beyond there,
they came.
From fields full of petals of blood in bloom,
they came.
From where grains of wheat paint dry dreams,
they also came…
to see him touch the home soil from out of the dark skies…

Now

Long tears mingle with dawn mist,
flowing outward freely to soak his Versace shirt
as they surge forth like hope,
forth through cold, barbed, perimeter wires
guarding the empty national airport…
to him whose voice was once their own.

________________________________________
* Amani is the Swahili word for peace.